Digital communication has become commonplace in recent years. With more cost effective ways to gather and store data and more connected devices, the amount of data that is gathered is continuously growing. Consumers are aware of possible negative side effects and are interested in preserving their anonymity.
On the other hand, digital media is increasingly shared illegally and tracing is required to stop piracy. For this, digital media is commonly marked with an identifier that is registered with some properties of the playback device in a table that links identifiers to playback devices. If this marked content is distributed, the identifier points to the playback device. This can be used for analytics about the source of piracy, disentitle the device to receive further content, to notify an individual about legalities of piracy and to enforce legal actions against the owner of a device used to illegally obtain and distribute content in order to remediate the content leak and prevent further abuse. In some scenarios and jurisdictions there is a privacy concern when embedding information that relates to an individual device or group of devices. This can be addressed by decentralizing the assignment of the identifier, allowing privacy and anonymity for the owner of playback devices while still maintaining some mechanisms of anti-piracy. In addition to preventing an operator, law enforcement or copyright owner to understand the identity of an individual person or device, the decentralized storage also secures the data against leakage from a unauthorized access (or hack) of the centrally stored data, reducing the risk and required security effort of maintaining the system that otherwise identifies a large number of devices in a central database.